Wednesday, January 22, 2014

[Personal note by Anthony: Yes, I know, it's been quite a while since I last posted here at BPPA...my night job combined with some sheer laziness on my part has contributed to that. I'm going to do my best to re-crank the posts here more often....and also add some more personal commentary rather than just recapping current porn events. Just be assured: BPPA isn't dead, by any means.]

Way, way, waaaaaaay back in the 1990's, when the LA porn industry was still more like the Wild Wild West in regards to its quasilegality and its means of protection, the idea of having an introductory video for people interesting in having sex on camera for pay might have seemed radical. Back then, though, testing was still mostly a hit-or-miss proposition via the ELISA antibody test, and knowledge and education of the risks of live sex was spotty at best. That began to change after the 1998 "outbreak", where a performer was confirmed to have gotten infected with HIV (and faked his tests to hide that result); the Adult Industry Medical Foundation was founded soon afterwards, and DNA testing greatly improved the quality of protection. It also helped that AIM founder Sharon Mitchell got some of her best friend porn performer allies, including a well known performer at that time named Nina Hartley, to create a video and circulate it amongst budding ingenue performers. That video, titled "Porn 101", became the standard of that time for introducing newbies to the fruits and the hazards of being an adult entertainerHepa.

Flash forward to the current era...where testing is now worlds beyond even the heights of the 1990s, where the Internet and social media have both revolutionized and terrorized the porn industry, and where the rewards and risks for performing sexually explicit imagery have been amplified even more thanks to the added profit streams. Given all the drama of the past few years with piracy, STI/HIV panics, and the condom mandate, getting performers to speak in one unified voice and offer clearer and safer paths for noobies wanting in on the action is an even dauntier task than ever.

APAC was originally the brainchild of performer/director Mick Blue and performer Anikka Albrite, who decided after the Great Hepatitis C and Cameron Bay/Rod Daily HIV scares of last year that it was time for performers to get together to represent themselves. Then they got two serious heavyweight high-profile performers, James Deen and Stoya, to join in and develop the core of the organization. From there...well, I'll just quote Mark Kernes' recent AVN article:

"APAC was basically formed by Anikka [Albrite] and me in my kitchen,"
explained veteran actor/director Mick Blue, "and then we brought James
Deen and Stoya into it, and then the four of us started to build the
APAC group, and Nina Hartley and all the others came to APAC later."

I should note that APAC is NOT related in any way to the group Adult Performers Coalition For Choice (APC4C), that was formed in the wake of Los Angeles County's Measure B campaign...though the two groups do share common goals.

As part of the process of organizing and educating performers, Blue hopped on the idea of updating that classic "Porn 101" video for the more modern era:

APAC has had several meeting[s] over the past few months, with one of its primary aims being the production of a new Porn 101
video. To that end, according to Blue, Kimberly Kane, Chanel Preston,
Jessica Drake, Anikka Albrite and Danny Wylde met as a group to create a
script for the project.

"One of the things I want to make very
clear is that APAC as a group is responsible for the things APAC does,"
Blue said. "Kimberly Kane, Jessica Drake and Nina Hartley, they
basically thought about doing another Porn 101 many years ago,
but it never happened. Then, after the first Hepatitis C moratorium came
up last year, followed by the first HIV moratorium, Anikka Albrite and
me said, 'We need to make a change now to the industry,' so I started
calling people and said, 'Okay, guys, we need to get together; we need
to make a change. We need to form a performers' group where we can
create a voice for performers, and speak, for example, to the producers
and also Free Speech [Coalition] about moratoriums and so on.' When we shot the Porn 101 video, we invited other people to speak in front of the camera. It's now on YouTube."

To say that the Porn 101 remix is impressive is an understatement. Check out the cast:

"For us, it's all about the need to make our industry safer
and to explain to people that are working in the industry that they
have responsibilities to all the other people they work with," Blue
said. "It's like explaining to them, 'Look, you need to watch out what
you do in your private life because everything you do in your private
life can put everybody who is in the industry who is working with you in
danger as well, as we've seen in the past three moratoriums.' So we
hope that through this video, people are going to get a better idea
about our industry and about their responsibilities and also about their
own bodies and their own safety regarding agents, producers and so on."

Kernes' article does a much better job of summarizing all the goodness of this video; feel free to go to his article. I'd rather just let you watch for yourself. So, with full thanks and appreciation to APAC for their permission to repost: here you go, folks. (Original here, via YouTube, props also to Kinky.com)

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Why yes, this blog is dedicated to pro-porn activism! With the belief that pornography falls under the auspices free speech and expression, and is legitimate entertainment for consenting adults, if made for and by consenting adults. One, as a consenting adult, has the right to make and view pornography as they choose.